There was a steady, distant hum of traffic on High Street as I entered the funeral parlour. Set well back behind its own car park lined with trees it was a pale square of a building, rendered white walls broken up by black glass.
The consultant, neat, efficient, fiftyish, was apologetic. We were sitting at an oblong table in the client room, a kind of reduced boardroom with sympathetic quotes on the walls and a water jug on the table and no ashtrays. Death! The consultant’s laptop had crashed and all the details of the deceased had been lost. She left me to find some ghostly IT person in an office elsewhere in the building, and I gazed out the window at a garden bed humming with flowers. Beyond that, passing vehicles on High Street were blurred wraiths, their soft filtered whine fading in the mid-afternoon air.
Fifteen minutes passed. A gold-flecked shaft of sunshine fell on the carpet and crept up the leg of the boardroom table. Then the consultant returned, sombrely exultant at having found the information in some dark file vault in the company’s server. I saw the funny side. Humour is dark. I laughed. My mother would have laughed. The joke was on her. The consultant apologised and we got on with the meeting.
*
"I had my own reaction figured out wrong, all the way. I feel what I shouldn't be feeling, and I don't feel what I should be feeling," said Jimmy Wing in A Flash of Green, John D. MacDonald's 1962 novel. "I was afraid I'd either cry and couldn't stop, or laugh and not be able to stop, but I didn't do either. And either way, it wouldn't have been for her, somehow. It would have been for ... for kind of the general idea of death. I can't even be sure I'm human." His friend Kat Hubble replies: "You are, Jimmy. Completely. Every kind of grief is ambivalent, because it's full of different kinds of emotion nobody can sustain. There isn't anything consistent about it."
*
The granddaughter had cried and cried at first, when she found out, ninety minutes after her grandmother died. Yet it is harder a week later, when the truth sets like concrete. We visited the house, just her and me. On opening her walking frame we found, among other daily essentials, a broken comb. She had been using it to tame her wiry grey strawlike hair that nevertheless cascaded wildly below her shoulders, even at that age; just like she had when her hair had been honey blonde, and she was sixteen, and the war was on, and the US soldiers camped at Royal Park came to the gate of the college in North Melbourne to talk to the girls. A broken comb. Why not? It will do the job.
*
The meeting proceeded: Church. Priest. Music. Flowers. Quotes for the memorial booklet. Resting place. Venue afterwards, for the wake. Food. All fixed. Live-streaming? No. Cameras in a church? Decades before streaming I had detested the event-videoing obsession; attendees wielding cameras like reckless cinematographers, fluoros casting unworldly light on their subjects and turning them into bloodless shadowless aliens. She didn’t want streaming anyway. Everyone would be there. Not that she wanted any fuss - in her papers I found a written directive that everyone at the wake be well-fed. Her ashes could be scattered to the wind, she had added. Cheaper.
*
The consultant was still apologising when I left the building. No need, I said, smiling. It was a pleasant and all-too-rare fifteen minutes of silence, contemplation - and that humming flower garden.
*
As I moved into the High Street traffic I wondered if she thought I was being sarcastic. I hoped not. The comment was as far from sarcasm as anything I’ve said in my life.
*
Something calls to me/The trees are drawing me near/I’ve got to find out why/Those gentle voices I hear explain it all with a sigh
- Justin Hayward
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